Gift of the Unmage (11 page)

“Me? Absolutely nothing,” he said again. Same words, different context.

Thea began to have an idea of what was beginning to take shape around her. She was, somehow, improbably, prey—or not prey, exactly, not in the way the Alphiri thought of it. She was the bargain.

And bargains were the Trickster’s stock in trade. He had been promised something, if he could deliver Thea to where the Alphiri wanted her to be. The Trade Codex clearly stated that the transaction was with whoever currently held the goods—and if the Trickster delivered them, then the Trickster would be the one to be paid.

It was an irresistible game to someone like Corey.

“Just as a matter of interest, how did you
know?” he said, interrupting her thoughts, sounding just a touch aggrieved. “I thought I did a pretty good job.”

“You did,” Thea said. “But you don’t love me.”

His eyebrows shot up. “Oh? Child, you’re wrong—I absolutely adore you….”

“The idea of me,” Thea said, “the things that I could mean for you. I don’t know what those are. But she,
she
…she looked at me with love in her eyes, and all you could manage was…well…
interest
. Not the kind of interest that meant you cared what happened to me, but the kind of interest that I was something only valuable because you could trade me for something else. She would never have left me asleep in the sun.”

“Curious,” said Corey, sounding a little chagrined. “I clearly need to work on my technique. I am apparently terribly rusty.”

“What is your real shape?” Thea said suddenly.

He glanced up, startled. “What real shape? They’re all real. Unless you mean this…”

He blurred again, flowed into a smaller shape, lower to the ground. And there he was, the dog
that Thea had sensed in him, except that this time he was not cowed and his tail stood high, a plume of reddish fur that blended into the rust-colored rock behind him. His ears stood forward alertly, and a pink tongue lolled out between white canines from which the lips had been drawn back ever so slightly in an approximation of a snarl.

Or a clown’s grin.

Thea suddenly smiled, and Corey flipped back into his human shape, scowling.

“Your kind is supposed to be afraid of wolves,” he said, annoyed.

“Wolves, yes,” Thea said. “You didn’t turn into a wolf. Exactly. You looked…”

“What?” he snapped.

“Well…cute.”

“Oh, swell,” Corey said, leaning back against his boulder.

“What
did
you do with Grandmother Spider?” Thea said conversationally, changing the subject.

“She’ll be back all too soon,” Corey said. “Won’t you just go through that door? Don’t you
want
to go home?”

“I don’t know if it leads home,” Thea lied
glibly. “Besides, don’t you want to know where you went wrong?”

“You already told me that,” Corey said. “I didn’t love you.”

“That, and…”

“And what?”

“Well, there’s always the little things.”

“What?” he said, interested in spite of himself.

“The way she walks. The way she carries herself. The way she turns her head. The way she speaks.”

“I got
all
of that wrong?” Corey said, sounding honestly appalled.

Thea could not help laughing. The Trickster sounded so wretched, so defeated.

“All I can tell you is that there was something…different,” she said. “It’s hard to explain. If you could turn, for instance, into
me
, then I could tell you exactly how good your illusions are. But then, you probably couldn’t.”

“You think I can’t change into your form?” Corey demanded. “Whatever makes you think that? You’re almost too easy!”

He blinked again and when he resolidified, Thea saw herself, standing a touch awkwardly in the shadow of the boulder, her hair blowing
about her shoulders.

“Do I really slouch like that?” she said, caught by surprise.

“Oh, yes,” Corey said, sounding smug. “And you’re always doing this….”

He blew a stray strand of hair off his face…
her
face…and then reached to tuck it behind an ear. The gesture was warmly familiar, and it tugged at Thea’s heart. It was odd to be looking at her own likeness, and not in a mirror—a double that moved and talked and looked like her, but independently of her.

She cleared her throat. “Well, for a start, you got that wrong.”

Corey smirked, the expression strangely disturbing when nestled on her own features. “You think so? You’ve never watched yourself, then.”

“That would be kind of hard to do,” Thea said.

“But I know there are people in your own world who can,” Corey said. “Folks who can send out their spirits and see the world and themselves in the world—”

“Then you also know that I was never one of those people,” Thea said abruptly, feeling the ache of an old hurt.

But her response was instinctive and no longer
quite true. Even as she flung up her old defenses, Thea was aware that Corey’s words didn’t sting as they might have done only a very short while ago. Thea was still struggling with the reasons behind
I won’t
rather than
I can’t
when it came to her doing magic, but the difference was clear, and it was one of choice. It was hard to feel quite as inadequate as she used to.

Corey turned back into his young-man form. “It’s hot here,” he said, drawing a hand over his brow to wipe away a film of perspiration.

“Yes,” Thea agreed. The sun was an almost solid presence now, beating down with the relentless white heat of the desert summer day.

“You could be home, you know, through that door. In minutes. In seconds. Instantaneously.
Really
. You could.”

“How do you know that?”

He looked coy. “I know many things.”

“Well, but I’d rather wait until she comes back,” Thea said.

“But then it will be too…” Corey caught himself, and a new and different curiosity came into his eyes. “So, then,” he asked, as if he couldn’t help himself. “What
did
you see?”

“What do you mean?”

“When you looked into it, just now,” Corey said. “What did you see?”

“Nothing,” Thea said. “Mist.”

“But even I can smell—” He shut up abruptly, looking down at where he was scuffing the dry earth with the toe of his boot, raising a small cloud of dust.

“You don’t believe me?” Thea said. “Go look for yourself, then.”

“Are you serious?”

Thea shrugged. “You don’t need my permission. It’s an open gate.”

“A-
ha
!” Corey pounced on her words. “If it’s an open gate, then it must lead somewhere.”

“I’m sure it must,” Thea agreed placidly.

“And I definitely smell something strange,” he said, his nose twitching, glancing at the gate with raw curiosity.

“So look,” she said.

“It won’t hurt me?”

“How should I know? I told you, I didn’t see anything.”

“Well…” Corey approached the gate warily, again giving himself away. It looked as if every sense he possessed was now concentrated in the quivering questing nose of a dog sniffing for dan
ger. He lay a careful hand on the side of the door and turned in Thea’s direction again. “You sure?”

“As sure as I can be,” Thea said sturdily, no less than the truth.

Corey sniffed once more and then stood up against the Portal as Thea had done, and allowed his face to sink into it.

The effect was curious, looking at it from the side. The doorway was just a frame, from nothing into nothing, only the shimmering veil of darkness in the middle giving an indication of something otherworldly. Had he chosen to, Corey could have walked right around the door and still remained in this world. It was almost wholly two-dimensional, its depth a handspan, measured in inches. If it had been a normal door, by the time Corey’s ears entered the doorway, his nose should have been emerging on the far side.

But that was not what happened. He leaned into the Portal and buried his head and neck almost up to his shoulders into the veil, but nothing came out from beyond the door on the other side. The rather eerie effect was that the doorway was swallowing him whole.

Corey sucked his head back into the same
dimension as the rest of his body, and turned to Thea, blinking.

“Are you certain you see nothing?” he said. “I could swear I see things…trees…mountains…a house…”

“Really?” Thea said, making her eyes go round and wide. “Are
you
sure? What kind of house?”

Corey made a series of sketchy gestures with both hands, shaping a house in the air before him. “Just a house. With a dark front door, I think. And so much damp.” He wrinkled his delicate desert-bred nose.

“You’re obviously better at this than I am,” Thea said. Apparently oblivious of her flattery, Corey preened just a little.

“I’ve been at it longer than you can dream,” he said.

“Could you see it clearly?” Thea said, sounding wistful, almost plaintive. “If you could describe it, I can tell you if you’re looking at my house. But maybe…maybe you could…”

“What?” Corey said.

“Well,” Thea said slowly, “if you looked at it…as…well…as
me
…you know, through my eyes, maybe you’d know instantly,
just as I would know—and if you can tell me that’s where it leads…” Thea sighed. “I
do
want to go home….”

“You raise a good point,” Corey said. “It’s your gate, and it’s attuned to you. Which does make me wonder why you can’t see…”

There were real tears in Thea’s eyes when she looked back at Corey. She had never been very good at guile, but perhaps it was just that this time she wasn’t wholly pretending; the fake self-pity that filled her gaze was leavened by genuine pathos and pain. “Tell me!” she said, and her voice broke on the words. “Tell me if you can see my home!”

Corey hesitated for a moment, and then shrugged. “It can’t hurt,” he said.

He changed into Thea again and stepped back up to the Portal, letting his face—
her
face—sink back into the veil.

Thea crossed the space between them in two long strides and pushed as hard as she could with the palms of both hands flat between his shoulder blades, propelling him forward into the Portal. She thought she heard a startled yelp as though from a very long way away, as he stumbled forward, and the Portal took all of him, took him
somewhere else
.

Her heart thumped painfully, Thea waited a span of long minutes and then carefully, very carefully, allowed her own face to sink back into the veil just enough for her to see through it.

It was home, that was for certain. There was a commotion in the trees as something struggled there, and the door of the house in her vision opened to reveal her father, peering out in a puzzled manner. Then Thea saw the knot of shapes in the trees fall apart, resolve into three tall Alphiri looking up helplessly as a large black bird—a raven—flapped with graceless speed away from them and escaped, flying through the trees. Thea could hear its angry, raucous screech as it wheeled once above the treetops and then disappeared into the distance.

The Alphiri were left empty-handed in the woods. Thea thought she heard an angry hiss, could even make out a few words if she strained—
It was he, it was the one we seek….

Then one of the Alphiri looked over his shoulder, his gaze pointed inexorably in Thea’s direction. The expression on his face was one of cold fury.

Thea pulled back quickly, stumbling back a couple of steps into the safety of the dry desert
heat, gasping for air and shaking her head to clear the vision of those angry eyes.

“Well done, child,” said a familiar voice. “You tricked the Trickster.”

Grandmother Spider—the
real
Grandmother Spider—stood a few steps away, and the love that Thea remembered was in her eyes. Grandmother Spider opened her arms, and Thea ran into the safety and comfort of that embrace, her narrow shoulders suddenly heaving with sobs.

“But I did want to go home,” she managed to get out. “I wanted to go back so badly….”

“But not on someone else’s terms,” Grandmother Spider murmured. “You have enough wisdom to know that your road back does not lie through that gate, wondrous as your achievement was. The Alphiri would have counted the price of passage not paid, and would have taken you instead. You have to walk back. The long way.”

Thea rubbed her eyes with the heel of her hand, wiping her tears away.

“The Barefoot Road?” she asked quietly.

“Not even that, although learning to control it is important,” Grandmother Spider said gently.
“No, you have to go back the way you came. You have to keep the bargain.”

“But it was through an
Alphiri
Portal that I—”

“I know, and it is through one that you must return,” Grandmother Spider said. “Or the deal is broken. The Trade Codex is quite clear on these matters.”

“Are your dreamcatchers…?” Thea gasped, lifting her head.

“Oh, they are quite safe, although the Faele would have grabbed them if they could,” Grandmother Spider said reassuringly. “It was to deal with those little thieves that I stayed away for so long. I didn’t know he would come straight back for you—I am so sorry. I should never have left you alone.”

“But who said,” a new voice interrupted, “that she was alone?”

The voice was warm and pure, like liquid gold, like…like sunshine. Like that vivid presence of the sunlight that had been with Thea for hours out here in the desert.

Thea raised her head, the tears drying on her cheeks. She caught a glimpse of Grandmother Spider’s face, and if there had been love there before it had been the love of a mother for her
child, gentle and rich and nurturing. The expression that she wore now was full of a different kind of love, the kind given and received from heart to heart between two equals, between chosen soul mates.

“Hello, Tawaha,” Grandmother Spider said, and there was glory in her voice.

1.

A
S SHE TURNED
, Thea saw what she first took to be a lion-headed man. A closer look revealed that this first impression was an illusion. Tawaha’s face, with its strong, chiseled features and great amber-colored eyes, was framed by a cloud, a mane of bright burnished hair that seemed to lift and float about his head as though alive. He was barefoot and wore nothing more than a simple loincloth made out of some tawny beast’s hide. His body was stockily muscular, solidly built in a manner that suggested raw strength, and possessed of a catlike grace that filled every movement.

He reached out a hand and brushed Grandmother Spider’s cheek very gently, as though in passing; the movement continued
almost uninterrupted until the extended hand stopped to hover barely above Thea’s shoulder. His fingers did not touch her, but even through her clothes she could feel the heat of his presence, her skin crisping into the redness of sunburn.

“You’re right, my touch would burn you, my child, my far-kin, one born to my people so long after I first shared the sky of the First World with them,” Tawaha said. He was answering what had been mere feelings, barely formulated into thoughts—as though in his bright presence there were no shadows in Thea’s mind where he could not see if he chose.

Tawaha, the Sun, the first light of the First World. Her many-times-removed ancestor, who set his hand and heart to a dream shared by Grandmother Spider when they sang the worlds into existence.

“You couldn’t hurt me,” Thea said, raising her eyes to Tawaha’s face.

He withdrew his hand, but only slowly with every appearance of reluctance. “I could,” he said, smiling, “but never would I want to.” He flicked his eyes back to Grandmother Spider. “Maia told me that now would be a good time
for me to be here,” he said, and Thea had to think quickly before she remembered with almost a jolt that Maia had been the starwoman whom Grandmother Spider had summoned down from the sky. “Why did you not call me?”

“Because I knew you would come,” Grandmother Spider said.

Thea suddenly felt like an uninvited guest, a child who had blundered into a grown-up party. She stared, rapt, aware that she was watching something the likes of which she would probably never see again. The first love story ever, before worlds were spun to hold the love that these two beings shared long ago, shared still, would share forever. For all time.

Grandmother Spider gave Thea’s shoulders one last squeeze and let her go.

“Do you think,” she asked gently, “that you are ready to go back to Cheveyo now?”

“Yes,” said Thea. Her voice was a cry of yearning to stay here instead, to be a part of whatever it was that these two shared.

But she was not a part of it, except as a ghost from a distant future, a descendant many times removed from the glorious world shared by these, her sacred ancestors. She had been here for
a reason, for a purpose. That was achieved—she had proved something here, something important. The gateway that stood and still shimmered behind Thea on the edge of the great canyon was a testament to that. Now it was time for her to go.

“I wish I could stay,” Thea said, raising her eyes to meet Tawaha’s again. “But I am very happy to have had the chance to meet you, Father Tawaha.”

The form of address was instinctive, born of something greater and older than herself. Tawaha inclined his head in acknowledgment.

“Only remember this, my child,” he said. “Where you are and where light is, I will always be at your side.”

“And so will I, in spirit and in thought,” Grandmother Spider said, taking Thea’s hand again, her eyes again brimming with that love that Thea had missed in Corey’s impersonation of her. “We may meet again, somewhere, perhaps in the web of a dreamcatcher. In fact, I am sure we will. But for now, it’s time to say goodbye.”

She turned Thea around, her arm slipping around Thea’s shoulders, until they faced the
Portal again. “Through that is Cheveyo’s mesa,” Grandmother Spider said. “It’s only a step away.”

Thea balked. “But I
know
that it goes to…I’ve looked inside and I’ve seen…”

“Thea,” said Grandmother Spider, “look at me.”

Thea turned to her companion.

“You made that gate,” Grandmother Spider said. “But we are in the First World still, and here my word matters. When you are here by yourself, it may be that there is only one other place that this gate will lead you to, or that in the moment that you looked into the gate there was only one place where you wanted to be. But right now, in this moment, with me holding your hand, it will take you to where I command.”

“I believe you,” Thea whispered, but then shivered despite herself. “But I remember seeing my father coming out of the door of my own home. I
remember
. It was clear and it was real and it was there….”

“Sweet child of my spirit,” Grandmother Spider said, “remember, there are many worlds, and it was I who led the first people born of my spirit as they crossed from one realm to another,
I who opened the gateways of
sipapu
for them as they slipped from the world of darkness to the world of twilight to the world of light. This gate will not take you home, but it will take you to a place that you might have already started to think of as another home, a home for your spirit. Cheveyo is waiting for you.”

“All right,” Thea said. The serenity of pure trust filled her. She squared her shoulders and lifted her chin even as Grandmother Spider reached for her hand.

“Come, then,” Grandmother Spider said.

On the threshold of the gateway, Grandmother Spider released Thea’s fingers gently. Thea paused for a moment, turned; Grandmother Spider had stepped back and now stood beside Tawaha, her hair wheat-gold and her eyes the color of honey amber as though in an instinctive response to his own bright bronzed skin and tawny hair. Grandmother Spider raised a hand as though in farewell, and Thea lifted her own in response—and then, just as she stepped through the Portal, she reached out and hooked just one strand of the living light that hung in Tawaha’s presence and pulled it after her.

She thought she heard an echo of laughter
behind her, a delighted, indulgent laughter which suddenly and painfully reminded her of the way her father once laughed with her, when she was much, much younger and her flaws were still hidden, swept aside with the convenient excuse that she was still too young.

A part of her had thought that she would return to the high mesa from which she gained Grandmother Spider’s house for the first time, that she would have to clamber down that steep and terrifying cliff—indeed, Cheveyo had left her at the foot of the mesa with the admonishment that he would be waiting when she returned. But obviously he had been doing his waiting somewhere else, because Grandmother Spider had set Thea down only a few steps from Cheveyo’s own house. She could clearly see the entrance from where she stood, clutching a thin ribbon of light that was starting to feel painfully warm, as if she had stuck her hand into a fire.

As Thea watched, Cheveyo ducked out of his doorway and stood for a moment looking at her with his glittering obsidian eyes.

“Your turn to make breakfast,” he said. “I will be back in an hour.”

“But how…?”

He raised a single eloquent eyebrow, shifted his grip on his staff, and then turned his head very slightly, his nostrils flaring as he tasted the air.

“You brought change with you,” he commented conversationally. “I smell thunder. It is Chuqu’ta, the Thunder Moon; there will be rain today.” He nodded in the direction of the entrance to his home. “Breakfast. One hour.”

With no further word, he turned and strode off along the path that snaked behind the mesa, using his feathered staff to anchor his steps.

But didn’t he leave that back at the Barefoot Road
? Thea thought, confused, as she watched him disappear behind the boulders. She shrugged philosophically and ducked into the house. There was little point in trying to second-guess Cheveyo.

She rummaged, one-handed, in the storage niches in the back room. One of the first things that Cheveyo had taught her was how to make flat unleavened bread from ground cornmeal and bake it in the embers, and Thea supposed that was what he meant that he wanted for breakfast. Her other hand still clung to the thin ribbon of First World light, so bright that it illuminated the
whole of the inside of the house, its incandescent fire wound painfully about her fingers. She had noticed that the fire on the cooking hearth was banked, almost out. Muttering to herself, she thrust the ribbon of Tawaha’s light into the ashes.

The light writhed for a moment like a living thing, coiling like a serpent, and then the almost-dead fire burst into golden-red tongues of flame. It looked, perhaps, like any other hearth fire—but Thea stared, fascinated, caught up in the play of colors as the fire danced and flickered. The earthenware pot of cornmeal was forgotten on the ground near her foot as she crouched beside the hearthstones. She had called something extraordinary from the First World to take up residence on this hearth, used for such everyday purposes as baking flatbread or roasting ears of corn.

Thea could see the sunlight in this fire—but not just the molten heat of the desert summer. There was also the high cold white sun of the far north, frozen light cuttingly sharp in the brittle sky; there was the scintillating sunlight sparkling off the surface of the sea or caught at play in the tumble of a waterfall; there was the filtered green sunlight so familiar to Thea, drifting through the
firs in the green-gold haze of summer. Touched by Tawaha, the little fire blazed and danced in first morning of the month of the Thunder Moon….

Cheveyo had explained the moons to her. Now Thea reached back into her memory, sorting her thoughts, retrieving the information. Thunder Moon, Chuqu’ta, carried within it the dangers of overoptimism, even hubris, but also the gift of reason by which such rash impulses could be checked. If caught in time.

A dry chuckle behind her startled Thea to her feet. She kicked the cornmeal pot at her heel and overturned it, scattering meal on the ground.

Cheveyo stood watching her with amusement crinkling the corners of his dark eyes.

“Do you realize,” Cheveyo said, tilting his chin in the direction of the fire, “what you have done?”

“I was trying to make flatbread,” Thea said lamely, dropping her eyes to the scattered cornmeal.

“With sacred fire?” Cheveyo said.

“I didn’t mean to—”

“I know,” Cheveyo said. “That’s why I brought these.”

He handed her a bag he wore over his shoulder, and Thea took it, looking at him quizzically.

“Breakfast,” he said. “Berries. And then we can talk.”

“Grandmother Spider said you still had many things to tell me,” Thea said. “She also said that time was running short. Why did they
really
send me here, Cheveyo?”

“I would have thought you got a lot of answers to questions like those in the time you spent in the First World,” Cheveyo said.

“In the First World, I can make gates between worlds,” Thea said. “Here, I can weave a ribbon of light. Back home, I can’t do anything. You still haven’t taught me to do anything that I can take with me when I—”

Cheveyo’s eyes snapped, a spark of black fire. “I expected more of you than that,” he said curtly. “Haven’t you been listening to a word I’ve said to you since you’ve been with me, Catori? I haven’t spent a single moment teaching you how to
do
. I’ve been teaching you how to
be
.”

“That’s not true!” Thea said. “You’ve been trying to get me to walk on the Barefoot Road—and that’s doing. What of the weaving?”

“None of that matters,” Cheveyo said calmly.
His serenity had regenerated, as though someone had thrown a stone at the still surface of the deep pool that was his spirit, and the surface stilled again after the ripples died away, giving no indication that it had ever been disturbed. “None of that matters, because every action you have taken has been based on a change in yourself, in the spirit you brought here to me to be healed of what it believed were its faults. But now you know better, don’t you?”

“I may know,” Thea said, “but I don’t understand.”

Cheveyo nodded. “Very good,” he said. “That is an important distinction. What makes you think you lack understanding?”

“I know the
where
,” Thea said. “I know it’s something to do with the world of my home, and the way that world and I affect one another. I know the
when
—it’s been going on all my life. But I knew all of that long before I came here.”

Cheveyo waited in silence. Thea’s eyes were sparkling with frustrated fury, with a glint of tears.

“I even know
who
,” she said. “It’s the Faele and the gifts they gave me at birth, and the Alphiri who seem to think that these gifts are
valuable, and the family who wants so much from me, and all the people who waited while I grew up and failed to do what everyone expected. Most of all it’s me and some strange choice that I made when I was born, before I was born. What I don’t know…”

“Yes,” murmured Cheveyo, “the last two questions.”

“I don’t know the
how
, and I don’t know the
why
,” Thea said. “And I’m supposed to be going home, with no more than that. I come back and the situation remains exactly the same, doesn’t it? I’ll still be me, and I’ll still be bound by my choices.”

“But not by your world,” Cheveyo said.

“What does
that
mean?” Thea said. “When I go back home, I go back to the same world that I left to come here. Don’t I?”

“If you say so,” Cheveyo said, annoyingly calm, reaching out for another handful of berries.

“Well, I do say so,” Thea said. “It’s all very well to know that I don’t do magic back home because I have for some reason chosen not to. But
why
, Cheveyo? Why did I choose not to? And just when exactly was it that I chose that—
I can’t remember making that choice. I can’t imagine making that choice—not with my family, not with what I was born as! They expect so much…and all I know is that I have somehow deliberately turned my back on those expectations. What do I tell them, when I go home? That I am still Thea, the One Who Can’t? What do I tell my father?”